Category Archives: Media

sIn the frenzy leading up to the U.S. Open, Craig Smith, writing at the Seattle Times, compares the excitement of a major sporting event being held in Seattle’s “backyard” (I’m sure the residents University Place just love that characterization) to a natural disaster that killed 57 people – the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980.

But if you allow yourself, you can share the excitement of having one of the world’s major sporting events held in your backyard. It’s like when Mount St. Helens erupted. If you were around in 1980, you probably felt like an insider when East Coast friends called to ask about it.

The Seattle Times is no stranger to insensitive reporting on Mount St. Helens, publishing, if memory serves me, a photograph of two small boys in the back of a pickup truck, where they had first stripped off their clothes trying to keep cool in the intense heat of the blast, and ultimately perished, only to be stripped again… of the dignity they should have been allowed in death.

If that photo was meant to engender empathy on behalf of the victims, it doesn’t seem to have worked with Mr. Smith, whose memory of the event is, apparently, dominated by the excitement and sense of importance he felt when given the chance to fill in details for distant friends and family. Rather than the sadness and awe normal people would feel at the loss of life and the unfettered power of Mother Nature.

How shallow. “Watch the U.S. Open your best chance to feel like an insider since Mount St. Helens erupted!”

Like this:

I mean, really, look at that face. Have you ever seen anyone look more self-satisfied?

That’s the face of a man who thinks he’s so much smarter than you poor miserable mouth-breathers that you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever figuring out that he’s lying to your faces.

And if, from the comfort of your mother’s basement, or the trailer park, one of you did manage, after endless bumbling and stumbling about (drunkenly, probably) and an healthy dose of luck, to figure it out…Well, hey, he’s got no worries because his friends in the media will circle the wagons (here and here) to fend off any attacks from Right Wing Nutjobs. Or Teabaggers. Or both.

So the next time you sit down for the evening news, keep in mind what your betters in the media think of you and the other troglodytes watching.

Brian Williams has apologized for making a grievous “mistake” in which he remembered and repeated, over the course of, what, 11 or 12 years, an event that never happened.

As he “remembered” it:

“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said on the broadcast. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”

So, yeah. That never happened.

What did happen, you might wonder, for Williams to misremember it so badly?

This:

Williams and his camera crew were actually aboard a Chinook in a formation that was about an hour behind the three helicopters [that had previously come] under fire, according to crew member interviews.

[William’s] Chinook took no fire and landed later beside the damaged helicopter due to an impending sandstorm from the Iraqi desert, according to Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Miller, who was the flight engineer on the aircraft that carried the journalists.

“No, we never came under direct enemy fire to the aircraft,” he said Wednesday.

So nothing. The entire story is a product of William’s imagination.

During his explanation, Williams said, “I would not have chosen to make this mistake. I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”

Wow, I guess somebody needs to see a neurologist to figure out what’s going on in that brain of his! Or a psychiatrist.

Pfft! Let me clear things up for you, Brian. This thing called “lying” caused your mistake. Lying is when you say something you know to be false. You lied to make yourself seem heroic and more important. Also, don’t think you’ve apologized for lying; for an apology to be sincere, there needs to be some sort of indication that the person doing the apologizing recognizes his own wrongdoing on some level. I’m not seeing that here.

Smith later demonstrates a gigantic 38-foot-long video wall with a device “never been used in broadcast television before.” It’s a remote control that allows Smith to shuffle through an image carousel with no apparent journalistic purpose. “For instance, I can take this lady who’s been evacuating from a hurricane zone and move it over here,” Smith says.

All I could think, when I saw those newsroom staffers in the background sitting at those ridiculously large touch screens was, “Where’s Edith Ann?”

Like this:

Here’s the question: How stupid does one have to be to disqualify one’s self from employment as an anchor at CNN? The answer, apparently, is “pretty damn stupid,” as demonstrated by Carol Costello this morning during coverage of the D.C. Navy Yard shooting.

On the off chance that the powers that be at CNN think this does disqualify Costello, my dog Shasta is available as a replacement. I think her IQ would match up favorably with Costello, and she looks great on camera.

Like this:

Yesterday I posted about the efforts of ABC News to shape the narrative of the Trayvon Martin case. Today, someone sent me this graphic that sums up the news media’s treatment of the case. And just about every other news story, for that matter.